This invention relates generally to social networking and, in particular, to displaying information about entities in a social networking system.
Social networking systems capture large volumes of information from various sources. These sources include mobile devices, user posts, picture uploads, news, etc. Information stored by the social networking system will often be associated with time, location, user, and subject data. The time and location data captures temporal and geographical information related to a source while the user and subject data may capture, respectively, the identity of the author and the conceptual subjects of the information. For example, a photo of a car uploaded to a social networking system may be stored in association with a time stamp, a geographical coordinate, a subject tag (identifying the car brand in the photo) and a user identifier (identifying the user that took the photo or an entity associated with the photo). Typically, information about an entity of a social networking system is displayed through a profile page that is divided into sections, each section including different types of information pertaining to the entity. For example, an entity profile page may have separate sections identifying events and photos related to the entity.
However, as the social networking system accumulates information about an entity over time, the limited display space of the profile page makes it difficult for the social networking system to organize information about the entity. Because of the information accumulated by the social networking system about an entity, the entity's profile page may make it difficult for users to access older information about the entity. For example, fans of a musician may wish to view information related to that musicians earliest albums and performances, rather than his latest work, which is typically more readily accessible via a profile page.
Efficient storage of the information about an entity allows the social networking system to enhance user interactions. Because of the large amount of information captured by the social networking system, use of compact yet informative structures to store information allows the social networking system to efficiently retrieve information for presentation to users.
Further, information associated with a time period is often related to other information associated with the time period, making it desirable to associate or display information from the time period together. For example, a social networking system user may be interested in viewing photos of a particular musician from the same time period as music released by the musician. However, if the entity's profile page displays information segmented by information type, then viewers wishing to view the music and pictures in conjunction with each other need to manually search the profile page for each type of information. This makes it difficult for a user to concurrently view different types of information related to a particular time period. Additionally, allowing an entity's profile page to provide an indication of whether an entity is spoken about, liked, or popular in its own social circles may further increase user interactions with the entity.